That the Windows 7 phone could be worse is little consolation

I played with a Windows 7 phone at the Bell store (the LG Optimus Quantum). Although I wasn't repelled, I was puzzled. Things that should be fast were deliberately slow; navigation included pointless transitions that looked pretty the first time, but that I would soon get sick and tired of waiting to complete.

The device was so warm and heavy you could use it to give a hot stone massage. It is unsurprising that sales have been lukewarm. I was really hoping to see better from Microsoft, if only so that my mutual fund that depends on its performance would perk up a bit.

Will HTML5 make app stores obsolete? Don't count on it.

HTML5 is a lovely platform for cross-device development. Basically, it's the only game going forward. But it's really not an answer for building a great app for a given platform. Apple is talking up HTML5 in order to combat Flash, but it's just talking about web sites, not apps. HTML5 will rule the [moribund] desktop, but for mobile devices I think it has major challenges.

HTML5 does not get the same level of access to the device that you need to build a rich experience.

• Integration with the contact list (is there anything really more important?)
• Access to phone status, history and actions
• Camera(s), proximity sensor(s), microphone(s), accelerometer, compass, gyroscope, multi-touch, speakers, etc (and a lot more to come)
• Local storage, access to SD-card files, application backup and restore
• Native configuration and management interfaces (sync, preferences, phone migration, privacy, network gsm-vs-wifi, etc)
• ... drumroll please: the app stores. This is the channel for getting apps for these devices. Otherwise they have to find your website somehow.

HTML5 apps will be good enough in some cases for all devices, but they'll always be step-children to the native environment. You could argue that we just don't care about the weird sensors and whatever else HTML5 doesn't give us access to. I disagree: the really useful apps for mobile platforms will take full advantage of these features, recording and correlating all sorts of information and drawing conclusions from it - where you are, where your customers are, when you're together, what you're carrying with you, how your spouses are getting along, what you've sold them, transcripts of your conversations, your body temperature, what they've bought recently, voice stress analysis, who else is around, what's mouldering in their warehouse, and what expression is on your face. Science fictional? Sure. "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." Mobile technology is going to level the playing field for these kinds of intelligent applications.

HTML5 will continue to evolve and will slowly add access to mobile functionality common to all devices, in a lowest-common-denominator way. The fact that Webkit will be on Blackberry by the end of the year makes HTML5 a cross-browser contender - it will lock up the entire mobile landscape, making cross-platform browser apps even easier. But so far, geolocation is one of the few things that work cross platform. The full list of things above will come over Steve Jobs' dead body. [I'm only half-joking.] PhoneGap is the only cross-platform development environment that currently has any viability at all, and it's risky because Apple routinely rejects PhoneGap-based apps; although they're written in JavaScript which is technically allowed, Apple takes a dim view of anything not *originally* written in Objective C. I don't expect Apple to be changing direction and opening up their platform and their store. If RIM survives [fat chance] its app store may go in a different direction - but I'm not holding my breath: RIM is completely beholden to [evil] carriers.

The app stores are large and getting crowded. But the publishers, labels, studios and carriers are in bed with the Google and Apple markets, and they have real legs. The markets are evolving extremely fast, especially Google's (which is moving into music and movies, and even has meta-markets like AppBrain) and Apple is s-l-o-w-l-y migrating to a non-desktop iTunes store. The smartphone market is exploding, and every one of these devices has an icon on the front screen for the app store. I don't expect these stores to go away any time this decade - there's just too much money to be made.

Attention whores in the reputation economy

Yesterday on my way home I saw an ambulance driver texting as she drove. (At least she didn't have her siren and lights on.) But that wasn't the ironic part - no, that was the act of will that kept me from whipping out my phone and tweeting about it. Or better yet, whipping out my phone, taking a picture of her while I attempted to drive, and then tweeting the link. On the whole I'm glad I made it home alive.

The walk to the subway station this morning was surreal. It was snowing pink cherry blossoms which covered the streets and the grass, making me think of nuclear fallout and what a challenge it would be to clean that up if it wasn't just, you know, flower petals.

So then at the subway station there were new additions to the usual gauntlet of free newspaper pushers: a couple of well-scrubbed men pushing The Watchtower. So many voices clamoring to be heard.

The problem isn't an attention deficit, it's a surplus of bullshit. We create a cloud, a lake, an ocean, a galaxy of data, simultaneously afraid of where all this data is going and afraid that if we don't reveal more our voice won't be heard. We've reached the point of saturation with trivia and are waiting for the tool that will come along and stitch it together, but we're afraid of what that'll show. Mostly we're afraid that it'll expose our banality, our utter simplicity and lack of special worthiness of this embarrassment of riches that has been visited upon us.

I have the whole of human knowledge at my fingertips and I want to know more about the Octomom.

Rogers tells HTC Dream users to turn off GPS or 911 calls won't go through

On January 15 I received an SMS message from Rogers telling me I'd better disable GPS on my phone or I wouldn't be able to make 911 calls. This is the latest chapter in the unhappy saga of the HTC Dream on Rogers.

Rogers/Fido service message: URGENT 911 Calls: Please disable GPS location on your HTC Dream device to ensure all 911 calls complete. HTC is urgently working on a software upgrade and we will provide details shortly so you can re-enable GPS.

Instructions: Select Menu - Select Settings - Select Location - Uncheck Enable GPS Satellite

Message de Rogers/Fido : URGENT - Appels 911 : Veuillez désactiver la localisation GPS sur votre appareil HTC Dream afin de vous assurer que tous les appels 911 soient acheminés. HTC développe le plus rapidement possible une mise à jour du logiciel et nous vous fournirons les détails sous peu afin que vous puissiez réactiver la fonction GPS.

Instructions : Sélectionner Menu - Sélectionner Paramètres - Sélectionner Location - Désactiver les satellites GPS

First Rogers announces that they're not providing any more upgrades to the software on this platform. Then they announce that they'll upgrade Dream users to the HTC Magic for free (well, with a contract extension). Then the damn thing just doesn't work. Ah, the joys of early adoption...

I just want an Android device with a keyboard. Is that too much to ask?

Spam now leverages social networks

I've been getting spam lately purporting to be from a former co-worker. Apparently they harvested her MSN Messenger list – it impersonates her hotmail account and sends to my work account.

This was probably due to a virus which hijacked MSN messenger, it's a notoriously problematic service: between the service outages, trojans and viruses, its usefulness is debatable. But even as Microsoft gets its security act together a decade too late, the attack is inevitably shifting someplace else.

With social networking sites asking for email passwords to "import connections", people respond quickly. After all, they say it's safe, and you can always change your password later (but you don't). As it has been pointed out, as an industry we've trained people to type passwords, and that's what they do – whether it's a good idea or not, and that's why phishing is so successful. But once they have your contact list they can keep that forever, and it's a wonderful tool for a spammer.

Facebook and Twitter are unlikely to misuse this data too egregiously, they are connected to real money and companies with reputations to protect. But Pownce, which is going out of business – what about their data? And tacky little utilities like Twitterank which spam your stream, you'd better believe they're warehousing your connections. And your private messages. And everything else. You can put these things together and draw meaningful conclusions about the people involved.

Science fiction has been talking about spambots impersonating your family and friends for years, but now it's happening for real, and expect to see a whole hell of a lot more of it. Expect to start seeing requests from friends and family, asking for money through new and unfamiliar websites (or even familiar websites that have been compromised). Expect increasingly strange and subtle requests: you may not even know what they're really trying to get you to do, or why. In short, this is going to get deeply weird, really fast.

Why I don't recommend the iPhone 3G

^{backup battery}

I've had the iPhone 3G for a couple of weeks, and although I think it's revolutionary, fantastic, useful, blah-blah-blah, poor battery life is its fatal flaw. For most people, a phone is a phone first and foremost, and other uses are secondary. I know I'm tethered to the internet in general, and email in particular, but a phone has to function as a phone, or it fails. To function as a phone, it has to hold a charge for at least 24 hours under light usage, and the iPhone does not.

This is fixable through software. By being extremely careful about how I turn on 3G and WiFi functionality I can make it work reliably through the day without charging more than once. But I shouldn't have to exercise extreme caution and constantly massage settings to make sure the battery doesn't discharge in bare hours: it is a computer and it should take care of it for me. This is not the traveling salesman problem, it's easy: if the screen is off I'm not using it and I don't need the 3G network, so stop trying to nuke my balls.

I don't know when Apple is going to clean up this mess, but I hope it will be within a few months. Without this fix the iPhone cannot be successful, and I totally want the iPhone to succeed. I've helpfully supplied Apple with a bug report on this just in case they haven't read a newspaper, blog, or spoken to a single sentient being who's used the device. Those of us who have it are doing everything short of implanting a car battery to keep these things running: extra charging cables everywhere, car chargers, and even expensive portable battery packs. Without a fix, this is a failed phone.

WebEx is watching you, and won't stop

WebEx on the MacBook turns on the camera for no good reason, and doesn't let you turn it off.

I had a conference call yesterday, and as usual with these corporate time-wasters, there was a powerpoint deck intended to distract the audience from the carbon-14 decaying in their bones. I fired it up on the MacBook which I use for WebEx, because it doesn't work on Ubuntu and I've already wasted more than enough time trying to fix it. So it was going on (and on) repeating previous presentations, and I proceeded to try to get other work done.

When I proceeded to fire up Photo Booth to take a picture of an error I was getting on my iPhone I was told "The camera is already in use." That's weird, I thought. Sure enough, the little green light was on next to the camera. So I proceeded to close down apps. Finally nothing was left but WebEx, and when I shut that down the light turned off. Hmmm. So I started WebEx back up and started searching for the option to turn off the camera. And I kept searching. I couldn't find it, and that made me feel kind of dumb, so I sent in a support request to WebEx. Their response:

Hello Chuck,

Thank you for choosing WebEx.

Since you are using a built in camera, it starts automatically in the meeting. WebEx does not have any control over this and there is no option in the Meeting Manager to disable this feature.

However, if you are the host, you can uncheck the "Video" option while scheduling the session. You can uncheck this option even in the middle of the meeting.

To disable the webcam, please contact Mac Support or check in Mac Forums. For your convenience, I have provided a link which discuss about turning off webcam.

Disclaimer: The URL below will take you to a non-WebEx Web Site. WebEx does not control or is responsible for the information given outside of WebEx Web Sites.

http://osxdaily.com/2007/03/26/how-to-disable-the-built-in-isight-camera/

Please let me know if there is anything I can do to further assist you.

Regards
WebEx Technical Support.

Waitasecond. "WebEx does not have any control over this"? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Do they not have the flipping source code? WTFH? And then they recommend that I go into a console and hobble my operating system's camera support? Are they high?

Of course, that's just bullshit. They allow the host of the meeting to control the cameras of the attendees, but they don't allow you to control the camera on your own flipping machine. This is a backassward privacy policy. I have no idea or control over where my video is going – it could be recorded, it could be broadcast: millions could be watching me absently pick my nose.

There is now a piece of tape covering the webcam on my MacBook. When I first used the iPhone I thought that the camera warnings when using an app that touches the camera were silly, but now I greatly appreciate them.

Bad WebEx. I'm still waiting for you to go out of business, you silly $3.2B behemoth.

Hedy Fry on C-61, the Canadian DMCA

Members of the Canadian government are on the take from US media interests who are trying to criminalize, well, everybody. My MP, Hedy Fry, is a wonderful woman and I like her very much on most issues, but given that the film industry is a big deal here in Vancouver I expected the worst on copyright. Since she wouldn't comment when I asked her about her own party's copyright bill (C-60), I was surprised when she offered an opinion about Bill C-61. Although the Conservatives are only going a little farther than her own party in selling out Canadian citizens, she says that "This Bill does not serve either consumer or creator well," and that she would not support it without amendment. Some notable highlights:

"Everyone is in agreement that the Copyright Act has to be amended to reflect the impact of digital technology."

Really? Everyone?!?

"How to monetize digital technology to reward the creator and allow free and open use by the consumer is challenging"

...and it would be a challenge to finish that sentence, since it makes no sense whatsoever. Maybe "utilize" was the verb you were looking for?

"[...] since the invention of the printing press. The challenges seemed impossible then [...]"

Which challenges were those? The challenges of the established order keeping people under control and in continued ignorance? I do see a strong parallel, but it's not an auspicious parallel.

The text follows. Errors are hers (this letter is a mess). Proofreading, anyone?

CONSTITUENCY OFFICE 106-1030 Denman St. Vancouver, B.C. V6G 2M6 Tel.: (604) 666-0135 Fax.: (604) 666_0114	HOUSE OF COMMONS CHAMBRE DES COMMUNES OTTAWA, CANADA K1A 0A6	OTTAWA OFFICE Room 583 Confederation Bldg. House of Commons Ottawa, Canada K1A 0A6 Tel.: (613) 992-3213 Fax.: (613) 995-0056
	Hon. Hedy Fry, P.C., M.P. Vancouver Centre
Chuck LeDuc Vancouver, BC		JUIL JUL 1 6 2008

Dear Mr. LeDuc:

Thank you for your correspondence concerning Bill C-61, An Act to amend the Copyright Act.

As you are aware the previous Liberal government had tabled a Bill on this issue but it did not come to debate because of the election. The current Conservative Bill has been eagerly awaited since they announced their intentions, in December 2007.

Canada has signed two World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaties, but has not yet ratified them. The last time the Canadian Copyright Act was amended was in 1997 but these amendments did not address the WIPO treaty agreements. In the interim, communications technology has expanded rapidly. Everyone is in agreement that the Copyright Act has to be amended to reflect the impact of digital technology.

Bill C-61 should strike a balance between the right of creators to be reimbursed for their creative, intellectual property and the desire for consumers to have access to these creative works.

Indeed digital technology serves both the creator and the consumer well. It increases the reach and distribution of creative works as never imagined, before; which is precisefy what creators need and it gives consumers easy access to creative works that can entertain, enrich, and educate.

This Bill does not serve either consumer or creator well. It prescribes narrow, punitive solutions to a complex problem. In fact the Bill could well have the effect of curbing the use of digital technology, to the extent that it becomes useless. This would be a pity! As well, implementation of the measures in the Bill would be nearly impossible, unless one abandons all privacy rights or imposes locks on the digital technology that severely limits its application. How to monetize digital technology to reward the creator and allow free and open use by the consumer is challenging

---

- 2 -
As Liberals we believe that there should have been extensive consultations with legal experts, creators, distributors and conventional and digital media industries to find the right balance of solutions. It is typical of the Harper government that they do not consult but impose.

Liberals intend to begin these consultations over the course of the summer so that when the Bill comes to the House we can propose appropriate amendments. Moreover we believe that the Bill should be further subject to public scrutiny if it ever gets to committee stage. It could be that after we consult with the expert groups they believe that Bill C-61 is unsalvageable, in which case one would have to vote against the Bill and rewrite a new one.

These are exciting and challenging times in media communications technology that can broaden the consumption of arts and cultural products, in a manner unheard of since the invention of the printing press. The challenges seemed impossible then but solutions were found that led to a Renaissance of art and culture. We are at a similar point in history, now. We must not use a sledge hammer.

Once again, thank you for writing. Please feel free to contact my office if I may be of further assistance.

Sincerely,

(signed)

Hon. Hedy Fry, M.P.
Vancouver Centre

And finally, a scan of the letter:

Halting State

I bitched all the way through the first half of Charlie Stross' Halting State about how bored I was, and how I really didn't get it. Although the setup was slow, once the men from ONCLE came in it took off and went someplace I really didn't expect.

I'm not much of a gamer, and there are few games I've gotten sucked into (Ultima XII and The Sims, that's about it), but the vision of a future with pervasive mobile gaming woven into real life rings very true, and sounds very compelling (I mean fun). Stross delivers with new ideas in a fun setting (Scotland after independence from the UK) with logical progressions of the current geopolitical environment. My only complaint is that his usual characters pop up with new skins and do their usual mating dance, but that's pretty minor and wouldn't catch your attention unless you'd recently read Singularity Sky. My final verdict is that I highly recommended this highly technical and groundbreaking book.

Tools and emergent complexity: exonerating Twitter and Rails

Twitter has had substantial downtime over the last several days, and this has prompted no end of commentary and analysis. Ruby on Rails was initially blamed for the problems a year ago, then exonerated, then blamed again (and exonerated again). But blaming the hammer for improperly driving a screw is not very illuminating; blaming a screwdriver for how it drives a nail even less so, and although using a hammer and screwdriver combination to drive a large number of finishing nails probably isn't the best solution, until a better machine is invented you wouldn't necessarily know that.

The reason Twitter is having difficulties is that it truly is a novel application. The rules are deceptively simple on the surface, but the emergent complexity is profound, especially as you start to build a massive database of users (which Twitter certainly is now doing). The sort of many-to-many relationships embodied in the way people follow one another, coupled with the different options on what sorts of tweets you want to see, and the different ways of interfacing – the website, instant messaging, text messaging, a raft of third party applications (Twhirl, gTwitter, FriendFeed, et cetera, etc, &c, ...), the ability to track specific terms...

All of this adds up into an extremely complex system that gets exponentially harder to manage as the user base grows. The telephone systems' switching rules are simple by comparison: they are simple, one-to-one connections that connect, persist a short time, and go away, leaving nothing but possibly a billing record (and definitely an entry in an NSA database). A tweet goes onto a user's own list, their friends lists, possibly the lists of friends-of-friends, the list of anyone who is tracking that term, sends it out via SMS, instant messenger and the API, AND persists the message forever; if the user then decides to delete it or make it private then it is removed from all of those lists. Simple, huh? Oh yeah, and it has to do all of that in realtime.

Twitter is built on Ruby on Rails, which came from a simple project management application. Obviously a simple project management application isn't designed to robustly handle the type of complex operations outlined above. It turns out nothing is, which is why Twitter has no easy solutions at hand. Their difficulties in scaling would have likely happened with any existing platform, as not even airline reservation and telephone switching systems handle such a flood of interrelated and interdependent traffic coming from so many different sources – traffic that doubles in two months.

Evan Williams and company invented something new, and they shouldn't be blamed for not initially understanding the true potential and nature of the beast. Although it isn't profitable, it continues to attract investors; anything with this kind of growth and engagement is interesting to businesspeople. NTT invested for a reason, and it's not just because it is popular (and profitable) in Japan. This is an example of how next-generation communication is working: modern switching rules, attention-based networking – a step beyond instant messaging, a step beyond SMS and a step sideways from the phone system. The right tools for the job probably don't exist yet; maybe Erlang is a step in the right direction.

Lastly, I don't blame the Twitter staff for doing experiments on the site during the day. They live in the United States and there's no reason they should have to stay up all night. Besides, we should face the sobering conclusion that Japan's market and the rest of Asia might be more important to Twitter than the depressed, aging, and troubled North American market. From that standpoint, the US is a cheap, talented labour pool crafting clever mercantile goods to send to Asia in exchange for hard currency. Oh, how the worm turns.

Perfect fit

The buzz is that Microsoft is buying RIM, maker of the BlackBerry mobile device.

I think this makes perfect sense. Blackberry is ubiquitous, practical, and ugly. The development platform is terrible – if you were there for DOS, the Blackberry will seem eerily familiar. The operating system crashes regularly. Wonderful error messages like: "Null pointer exception" and "VM: too many threads" are common.

Ugly though it may be, it is very popular (heck, I have one). Microsoft has to have this. Their mobile platform is dead in the water, and this is where the market is expanding. I suspect that Microsoft was waiting for RIM's recent patent difficulties to blow over – the last thing a convicted criminal organization needs to do is buy more trouble.

So there will be a marriage, and many children. Sometimes ugly parents produce beautiful children. Just not usually.

Nortel's continued sad decline

Once-proud Nortel is back in the news, this time with a funny story about how they have a hard time keeping their former subsidiaries as customers. This is especially funny since Nortel's big successes in the go-go 90s were selling switches to Baby Bells who defected from Western Electric when they needed more switches.

For a while there it seemed like half the people I knew went to work at BNR/Northern Telecom/Nortel, and then just as quickly, none of them worked there anymore. The telecom boom died, and everybody had more than enough expensive circuit-switched almost-obsolete equipment depreciating noisily in their expensively airconditioned telecom equipment rooms – around the same time that people really started using blackberry and VOIP in a serious way. The Bay Networks acquisition never fared well against Cisco. Nortel never managed to come out with anything that resonated in the marketplace again, and their financials reflect that.

The telecom industry has become very rapidly commodified, and Nortel's half-cousin and arch-enemy Avaya has become the standard for awful, expensive local PBX solutions, while Asterisk-based solutions are ruining the party for all of the lumbering giants. Nortel could have ridden the wave of open source to become a new low-price leader, but instead seems intent on circling the wagons and riding its customer base down the drain.

And back to the earliest item: they apparently don't have any competent public relations staff. That's pathetic.

Switched to Skype

We've ditched our $30/month Vonage-clone VOIP service (Primus TalkBroadband) for Skype for $58/year -- with unlimited North American calling. The call quality is better, too. So they're going to help put Vonage out of business. Good thing, too, as the only thing I ever liked about Vonage is that they threatened the phone companies: beyond disrupting them, they never worked at innovating their service. I figure Skype has a couple of years to make some money before they're put out of business by P2P VOIP and nobody has to deal with landlines at all. They do at least have a nice (if nonstandard) codec going for them.